During the eighteenth century, a considerable amount of cloths and fabrics, imported from abroad and from the Italian peninsula, arrived by sea in Palermo, to meet the need of the town and to be redistributed on the island. At the beginning of the century, the trapanese merchants and the sea masters were among the main forwarders and shippers active in the customs of the capital, in the following decades, however, the Vietri merchants first and then the Positano ones became the main managers of this branch of trade. The church and brotherhood of San Giovanni Battista of the 'Neapolitan nation', that had settled in Palermo for a few centuries, became a meeting place and reference point for a large merchant community from Calabrian and Campania which in the second half of that century reached the highest level of activity.
